UIC Law Review Volume 34 Issue 2 Article 8 Winter 2001 The Seattle Art Museum: A Good Faith Donee Injured in the Restoration of Art Stolen During World War II, 34 J. Marshall L. Rev. 613 (2001) Courtney S. Perkins Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.uic.edu/lawreview Part of the Cultural Heritage Law Commons, Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law Commons, and the Military, War, and Peace Commons Recommended Citation Courtney S. Perkins, The Seattle Art Museum: A Good Faith Donee Injured in the Restoration of Art Stolen During World War II, 34 J. Marshall L. Rev. 613 (2001) https://repository.law.uic.edu/lawreview/vol34/iss2/8 This Comments is brought to you for free and open access by UIC Law Open Access Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in UIC Law Review by an authorized administrator of UIC Law Open Access Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE SEATTLE ART MUSEUM: A GOOD FAITH DONEE INJURED IN THE RESTORATION OF ART STOLEN DURING WORLD WAR II COURTNEY S. PERKINS* INTRODUCTION At the end of the First World War, Paris was the hub of the art world, known by many as "the queen of the arts."1 At that time, Paul Rosenberg, a Jewish man known to carry himself with an unmatched elegance, emerged as one of the most influential Parisian art dealers of both nineteenth and twentieth-century art.2 Continuing a family tradition,3 Rosenberg established a gallery located in Paris' nerve center of modern French art during the period.4 The gallery reflected Rosenberg's personal elegance and love for his life's work, with deep, leather sitting chairs and walls covered in red silk adorned with works by Matisse, Van Gogh, Braque, and Picasso.5 . J.D. Candidate, June 2001. Thank you to my parents for their support and instilling within me a love for the Arts. 1. HECTOR FELICIANO, THE LOST MUSEUM 58 (2d ed. 1997). Paris was the center for the sale of art in all the world, as though both London and New York did not exist in the world art market. Id. 2. Id. at 53. Rosenberg had enlisted works by such prestigious artists as Gericault, Ingres, Delacroix, Courbet, Cezanne, Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Lautrec, as well as works by up and coming modern artists of the time such as Picasso, Braque, the Douanier Rousseau, Bonnard, Marie Laurencin, Modigliani, and Matisse. Id. His client list was just as esteemed and diversified including Viscount Charles de Noailles, Count Etienne de Beaumont, patron of the Ballet Russe, the Swiss collector Oskar Reinhardt, Dr. Albert Barnes from Pennsylvania, Mrs. Arthur Sachs of New York, Mrs. Chester Beatty of London, Gertrude Stein, Dr. G. F. Reber, and various other esteemed patrons. Id. 3. Id. The family tradition began when Rosenberg's father emigrated from Slovakia to Paris, France in 1878. Id. Upon his arrival, he went into the art and antiques business in Paris. Id. Rosenberg, as well as his brother Leonce, followed in their father's footsteps and established his own gallery. Id. 4. Id. Various famous French Jewish gallery owners also lived in this small quarter such as Bignou, Hessel, Wildenstein, Guillaume, and Barbazanges. Id. It was also the neighborhood of Picasso, giving it the reputation as the center of the art market in Paris. Id. at 60-61. 5. Id. at 56. To his friends and acquaintances, Rosenberg was a man with The John Marshall Law Review [34:613 Like Rosenberg's prominence in the Parisian art scene during the early 1930s, Adolf Hitler solidified his prominence in the German political scene, just five weeks after his election as the Chancellor of Germany; his party won its first majority in March of 1933.6 From the very beginning, Hitler made it clear that art was very important to the Nazi regime.' As the Wehrmacht swept over Europe, the Nazis looted and confiscated thousands of art collections belonging to museums, galleries, and French Jewish families and art dealers.8 In 1938, the Nazis enacted a law allowing the sacking of cultural institutions containing works of art deemed "degenerate" or "too immense passion for the art in his collection and the artists he had taken under his wing. Id. at 57. "With his taste, his first-rate eye, social connections, and commercial acuity, Rosenberg became one of the prime dealers on the Parisian art scene, and his gallery was on the crossroads between the nineteenth-century and avante-garde art in France during the period between the wars." Id. at 57. 6. RICHARD BESSEL, LIFE IN THE THIRD REICH 44 (3d ed. 1989). After the failure of the Weimar government, the new Nazi majority flooded the disillusioned German people with extremely successful propaganda portraying Hitler not only as the head of the Nazi party, but as the leader of Germany, for whom the nation had been waiting. Id. at 46. The German people began to see a crippled post-Weimar Germany return to a state of order through the assumed achievements of Hitler through a rapid reduction in the unemployment rate and a rise in the economy. Id. All the while, the Nazi propaganda portrayed Hitler as the embodiment of true Germanic culture and the struggle of the little man. Id. at 44. By the end of 1934, Hitler established the Fuhrer cult, with himself as the Fuhrer, as an almost deified, national leader of the new Germany. Id. at 46. 7. See JOHN E. CONKLIN, ART CRIME 218 (1994) (discussing action taken in the beginning of the Nazi era to ensure the looting of fine art). See also LYNN NICHOLAS, THE RAPE OF EUROPA 6 (2d ed. 1995). At a Nazi-affiliated Combat League for German Culture meeting, only nine weeks after Hitler's takeover, the director set forth these ideas: It is a mistake to think that the national revolution is only political and economic. It is above all cultural. Art is not international .... If anyone should ask: What is left of freedom? he will be answered: there is no freedom for those who would weaken and destroy German art... there must be no remorse and no sentimentality in uprooting and crushing what was destroying our vitals. Id. 8. FELICIANO, supra note 1, at 3. The Nazi conquest of much of the mass collections of art in Europe was driven by Hitler's plan to erect in his boyhood home of Linz, Austria, the greatest art museum in all the world. CONKLIN, supra note 7, at 218. Alfred Rosenberg, Dr. Hans Posse, and Herman Goering controlled the drive to amass an extensive collection of confiscated art. Id. at 218-19. This group, commissioned to build Hitler's Linz Museum, used the power of the Nazi party and the ferocity of the SS to plunder, in the name of better preservation of the world's cultural treasures and relocation, for appreciation by the masses. Id. at 219. The Nazi party justified the plunder of the Jewish community as appropriation of cultural treasures from the "state-designated internal enemy." Id. 20011 The Seattle Art Museum Jewish."9 Hitler knew exactly which works he wanted expunged from Germany, and he made his intentions perfectly clear to his regime.'° Fearing that Paris would be bombed, Paul Rosenberg relocated his works to his new home in southern France,1 and arranged for his collection to be shown in exhibits in New York and Chicago. 2 He also safeguarded his works by placing them in bank vaults in Libourne, in the south of France far from the Parisian cultural center. 3 When the Nazis took Paris in June of 1940, Rosenberg decided to relocate his family to the safety offered by New York City. 4 Rosenberg's assistant informed him by letter in March of 1941 that the Nazis had located most of his works in hiding and the remainder left in his home." After the Nazis completed their plundering of the Rosenberg treasures, a member of the Nazi regime sent a message to the Nazi hierarchy, which revealed that 9. CONKLIN, supra note 7, at 218. Hitler considered the work of modern and impressionist French artists to be degenerate and directed their works to be kept aside at the Nazi's central collecting point in Paris. Nightline: Nazi Loot in American Museums: What Should Be Done With Stolen Art? (ABC News television broadcast, Apr. 28, 1998). The Nazis had a room curtained off that they filled from floor to ceiling with great 20th century works by artists like Picasso, Matisse, Gaguin, Van Gogh, and others. Id. Although seemingly unappreciative of their aesthetic value, the shrewd Nazis plundered these paintings as well, aware of their shear value in art markets outside the country. Id. 10. ELIZABETH SIMPSON, THE SPOILS OF WAR 39 (1995). The displacement of works of art began in Germany itself long before the actual outbreak of war. Id. Hitler directed that all cultural objects had to be pure and Germanic, and art would not be exempt. Id. He disapproved of anything unfinished or abstract, including the works of German artists, Vassily Kandinksy and Franz Marc. Id. However, his criterion was not only stylistic; Pissarro was unacceptable because he was Jewish and Kollwitz and Grosz because they were leftist. Id. It took even his closest colleagues to understand his desires. Id. 11. FELICIANO, supra note 1, at 52-53. By this time, Rosenberg had also relocated his family to the free zone in southern France in an attempt to live as normal a life as possible. Id. He took with him to this southern home in Floirac approximately 100 paintings, including those that held sentimental value, like the family portrait completed by good friend, Picasso.